Cabs of machines used for earth moving, construction, material handling, mining, and the like, are often customized after delivery to a customer, work site or upon machine commissioning. Such customization may involve adding hardware or software systems that are not supplied by the machine manufacturer (“Customized Equipment”) to the inside of the machine cab. Such Customized Equipment is typically manufactured by a third-party and may be installable in many different types of machine cabs manufactured by different companies. Examples of Customized Equipment may include dispatch systems, fatigue monitors, fire suppression systems, CB radios or the like, and other types of hardware and software.
The addition of such Customized Equipment may involve significant disassembly and reassembly of the interior of the cab and typically requires cutting the existing interior surfaces of the cab in order to mount the Customized Equipment to the cab and cutting into the existing wiring harness in order to connect the Customized Equipment to the electrical system, controller area network, or the like within the cab. Such cutting and rework may cause unintended damage to the cab interior and/or existing cab components.
U.S. Publication No. 2001/0030435 (“Burns et al.”) published Oct. 18, 2001 describes a cockpit system set of interchangeable modules for a vehicle. FIG. 2 of Burns et al. illustrates an embodiment of such a system. The interchangeable modules include a driver-side module, a passenger-side module, a center module fastenable between the driver-side module and the passenger-side module, a left-hand-drive top module, and a right-hand-top module. The disclosure describes a modular system in which the proprietary modules may be interchanged in order to switch from left-hand steering to right-hand steering and vice versa. The disclosure does not address the addition/mounting of Customized Equipment, as that term is used herein, to the cockpit system. A better design is needed.